I usually depends on twitter, blogs, news, regulatory websites... for example, CADE provides public access to opinions submitted by market participants in the merger register for Bayer/Monsanto so you can really get an idea whether the merger will get approved or not... last year i participated in ChemChina/Syngenta merger arb and got most of my info from CADE... really huge discount to merger price in Dec 2016 but reading comments from CADE gave me confidence to go all in... News reports on rumors about JUNO on the week before announcement was all over twitter and after reading up abit on the rationale of Celgene buying JUNO, i decided to take the plunge..buying shares first then selling near $86..then selling puts... Now CADE had approved Bayer/Monsanto and with the market correction recently..i m closing my JUNO and BIVV short puts to free up more margin for Monsanto...
I usually take bullish positions...in fact last year all my merger arbs were bullish... participated in 21 different merger arbs, won 16 lost 5... Most of my profits came from 3 concentrated high conviction positions...would like to diversify but its hard...
By Cade, you mean the Brazil anti-trust authority? They aren't the relevant agency though. It's the US as they are the ones who are nixing deals, especially in the semiconductor space.
For agri-chem/agri deals, they are one of the biggest... I believe the sector is split into 4 big regions - North America, EU, South America, Asia... Brazil is a large part of S.A. CADE is the easiest and earliest of the big regulators to pass. EU and DOJ are more problematic...they usually demand more concessions on top of those offered.... MOFCOM will wait for EU and DOJ before approving..usually the last... I used CADE because all other regulatory documents are not really accessible by the public. From CADE, we can see alot of info like comments on questions regulators posed to the types of products each competitor have...